Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen Guelzo (self help books to read TXT) 📕

It could only have conjured up nightmares of Nat Turner, of slave rebellion, of wholesale race war, to listen to Brown’s description of his planned insurrection, especially since it was evident that he had absolutely no regrets about what he had done or what he had planned to do. “I see a book kissed which I suppose to be the Bible,” Brown said at his sentencing, “which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do to them. … I believe that to have interfered as I have done in behalf of His despised poor, is no wrong, but right.” If the court found that sufficient grounds for his execution, then he embraced the verdict with the fervor of a Christian martyr. “Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say let it be done.” Brown’s trial lasted seven days, during which he behaved himself with amazing composure. He was declared guilty on November 2, 1859, and hanged on December 2 in Charlestown. His last words, written on a slip of paper and handed to a jail guard, Hiram O’Bannon, hung like dark thunderclouds over the American horizon: “I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away, but with Blood. I had as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done.”54

Brown’s raid caused an eruption in the South. Although Southern leaders publicly congratulated their slaves on their reluctance to rally to Brown’s banner, the behavior of Southern whites showed something entirely different from confidence. “Never has the country been so excited before,” wrote one Georgian in December 1859. “There was great feeling in 1820, but not like the present. The South is deeply stirred.” Governor Andrew Barry Moore of Alabama called for passage of a bill that organized volunteer military units in every Alabama county, authorized borrowing $200,000 to buy weapons, and established scholarships for young Alabama males to attend military schools. Slave codes were toughened, slave patrols were reinstated, and violence against blacks multiplied. White Northerners were particularly suspect, since travelers and strangers from the North could easily turn out to be emissaries of some future John Brown. Nonslaveholding white Southerners were also the target of suspicion. It had not escaped the notice of the planters and their friends in the Southern state capitals that Brown had chosen western Virginia for his raid, a region of comparatively few slaves but full of resentful white yeomen. It was even more disturbing to learn that the Harpers Ferry townspeople and even the militia had been less than enthusiastic in attacking Brown (the Virginia militia had, in fact, declined Lieutenant Colonel Lee’s invitation to make the final assault on Brown). “Watch Harpers Ferry people,” Virginia governor Henry Wise warned his agents in mid-November, and at Brown’s hanging, Wise ordered the local commander to “let no crowd be near enough to the prisoner to hear any speech he may attempt.”55

The ultimate message of John Brown for Southerners was the lesson of distrust for the North, for Brown’s raid was seized upon as argument-clinching proof that the North was only awaiting its opportunity to destroy the South by force, and the discovery of Brown’s private correspondence in his temporary headquarters in Maryland underscored how much support Brown had enjoyed from prominent Northern abolitionists. Northern reactions to Brown’s execution only served to redouble Southern accusations about the real intentions of Northerners. “This mad attempt of a handful of vulgar cut-throats,” wrote Robert Lewis Dabney, “would have been a very trivial affair to the Southern people, but for the manner in which it was regarded by the people of the North.”56

Although Lincoln and other Republicans hastened to wash their hands of any association with Brown, across the North Brown’s steadfast and unrelenting courage at his trial dimmed the idiocy of his raid and allowed him to emerge as a hero, and abolitionism as heroic. In Chicago, church bells were tolled at the hour of Brown’s execution, Albany fired a 100-gun salute, immense memorial meetings were organized in Philadelphia and New York, and in Boston William Lloyd Garrison praised Brown as a model fit for repeated imitation. “Was John Brown justified in his attempt?” Garrison asked enthusiastically. “Yes, if Washington was in his… If men are justified in striking a blow for freedom, when the question is one of a threepenny tax on tea, then, I say, they are a thousand times more justified, when it is to save fathers, mothers, wives and children from the slave-coffle and the auction-block, and to restore to them their God-given rights.” Garrison was a pacifist by conviction, “yet, as a peace man—an ‘ultra’ peace man—I am prepared to say ‘Success to every slave insurrection at the South, and in every slave country.’”57 No wonder the South saw Brown’s raid as sinister proof that the Union was turning into an embrace with destruction.

The primary casualty of Harpers Ferry was, ironically, the Democratic Party. Persuaded that no Northerners were to be trusted after Harpers Ferry, Southern Democrats now began to demand that their voice have the preponderant weight in determining Democratic policy. Addressing the Virginia legislature in January 1860, Christopher Memminger announced that the South must secure four guarantees in the next election for its continued safety—an equal share for the South of all the Western territories, the disbanding of all anti-slavery societies, the repeal of any laws that obstructed the capture of fugitive slaves, and a ban against any amendment of the Constitution respecting slavery—while others such as Jefferson Davis of Mississippi added to that demands for a national slave code that would prevent interference by a territorial legislature “whether by direct legislation or legislation